Intro: [00:00:04] Welcome back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software Web3, Healthcare, Tech, FinTech, and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:39] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have Steve Gilman with Range. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Gilman: [00:00:57] Hey, Lee. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:00] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about range, how you serve in folks.

Steve Gilman: [00:01:05] Yeah. So Range is a professional development platform and service that allows companies to invest in the individual employees. We’re a service that allows companies to strategically upskill all of their employees to make sure they retain and grow top talent.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:23] So how did you get into this line of work? Have you always been involved in this industry?

Steve Gilman: [00:01:29] Yeah, I think it’s it’s interesting. I haven’t always been. I come from a varied background of different types of organizations. But throughout my career, I reflected and understood that the one thing that I always tried to do, no matter what my job title was, was to empower others. And usually I saw myself doing that, advising chief people, officers or HR in terms of how professional development worked at the company. I basically wanted my self and friends to get ahead if they were willing to continuously learn throughout their career. And so whether it was with the government or with Johnson Johnson, IBM, in my past, I’ve always kind of found a way to to help others thrive. And so range is just a culmination of of that and making it more scalable for professional development to happen everywhere.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:22] So you always saw the value of professional development and came up with a way that it can kind of be deployed for more people and more situations.

Steve Gilman: [00:02:32] That’s exactly right. I saw the value in professional development. I also kind of saw whether it’s a small company or a large company, no matter what the industry is, it’s incredibly hard to deploy true professional development, which is usually very individualized, usually uses external resources. We’ve all heard of tuition reimbursement and things like that, and when it comes down to it, companies usually don’t have the infrastructure to do what’s needed, what their employees are continuously demanding for lifelong education. So I got together with my co-founder and CTO Hooten a little over a year ago and realized that we both saw the same issues, both as employees of larger companies and operators of our own companies in the past.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:18] So you decided to go the route with a co founder. Can you talk about kind of the trade offs you had to make when identifying the right co founder and kind of negotiating the arrangement?

Steve Gilman: [00:03:30] Yeah, I think who tends a good friend of mine and has been since we both started our first company separately, we met in a combined co-working center back in 2015 and each had our own experiences. I went into live events in hospitality with a company called BLOCK Party. He went into machine learning as well as an E commerce business. Starting from the ground up. When we settle on the idea of starting a company co-founding a company together. I think there was two main things. One, we had enough startup experience to know how forming arrangements work and and why that was going to be good for us, our company and any stakeholders that came along. So that was relatively easy to put together. Our first conversation and the other piece is bifurcation of duties. I’m clearly on the business side. He’s clearly on the product brand technology side. And so it was a little easier to know which domains we kind of control. And at the end of the day, we trust each other. So conversations have been easy ever since ever since we decided to start something together.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:43] Now, you mentioned your past. That’s been pretty varied in terms of what you’ve done, whether it’s been playing sports, whether it’s been getting involved in the government or work in enterprise level organizations, making this leap to, you know, a startup. How has that been? Or is this just another kind of game that you’re playing here and that it’s the same rules, just a different field?

Steve Gilman: [00:05:09] I like how I like how you frame that. So to kind of describe where I am in my journey, I am a recovering mechanical engineer, recovering professional baseball player, recovering project manager, recovering intelligence officer. And that all happened before I went back to business school full time to discover what I wanted to do next. I found very quickly, not just in the groups that I kind of spend most of my time with, but also just as a creative outlet that building businesses from the ground up was going to be what I did with my life, and I needed business school to understand how that transition work and get some of the skills I needed to apply every business that I start. I, I, I want to be with it for 10 to 20 years and beyond, and I want to be in it with the right people. So I started my first company in 2015. I started this latest one when I moved back up to New York during the pandemic, knowing I want to have a technology venture with Hooton and we started building. So, you know, startups for me are a time in my life where I don’t see anything else in front of me. Right. You kind of work for your own. You’re building that creativity. Whenever I’ve been part of other organizations, I’ve always looked out for what’s next. Now it’s all about Do we have what it takes to drive the mission? And so range is kind of a culmination of everything I’ve been through, but the only thing really that I care about right now.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:45] So in some ways it’s similar to sports in terms of you have a goal that you’re putting all your efforts and that building a team around. Do you notice any similarities to, you know, having been part of successful teams and have building your own team here with range?

Steve Gilman: [00:07:05] Yeah. So I owe baseball and athletic career to a lot of the lessons that I derive in my life about leadership, about achieving goals, about interacting with different personalities, dealing with adversity and everything like that. I think the main difference, which is why startups are just so interesting and fascinating and kind of never stop, is that with sports you usually have a goal defined for you. In baseball, it’s scored more runs than the other team and win the World Series, right. And keep climbing the ladder. So everything you’re doing is building towards that goal. Work harder, work smarter, get the right people on the team, lead through adversity. Awesome in startup land, in business land in general. All of those same things apply to hit the goals, but you have to define what the goals are, and it’s a little more ambiguity. There’s a lot more ambiguity when it comes to leading a team in the right direction, because you’ll never 100% of the time know the exact direction that you have to be leading the team. And so in that way, it’s more challenging, more stimulating. You bring all the pieces together, but you’re also doing a lot of trying to figure it out every every day along the pattern, if you’re if you’re heading towards the right goals, because if you achieve the wrong goals, it’s not going to matter much in terms of achieving your mission.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:29] Right. That’s something that’s always fascinated me about sports, is that in some ways, sports it’s it’s very it’s a meritocracy in the sense that the best players are the ones playing and participating. But each season kind of is finite. So there’s an end and that means there’s a rest period and reevaluation. And then rejiggering of the team happens. So sports and business have similarities, but you brought up some really great points, the ambiguity and the lack of, you know, kind of a finish line that’s, you know, that everybody knows that we’re all aiming for is a lot different. And it requires different skills and a different kind of timeline and level of patience and humility.

Steve Gilman: [00:09:13] Yeah, I think. I think that’s right. Our coaches used to pose it to us in baseball. You play for seven months out of the year what they call the championship season from spring training until you lose or win in the playoffs. And then you have five months off and you get sick of the game that you play every single day, no matter how exciting it is, that offseason gives you a chance to do something else, realize how much you miss it, and then come back energized. And the seven five rule kind of works really well for a lot of different sports. You don’t get the time off with start ups. Yeah, there’s slower times of the month and their seasonality to some of the things that work. But much like the rest of the working world, there’s no time off to kind of reevaluate and realize what you miss most about the day. So it’s a little bit different in that way. The other thing that I’ll kind of point out is in baseball, we often joked amongst the folks who went in right after college that you take it so seriously, right? You want to be competitive. It’s what you do. It’s your trade, it’s what you get paid for. But at the end of the day, it is a game, right? You still go to Denny’s after the game, eat your grand slam and then the next day you wake up and it’s all over. The worst that happens is some fans say I’ll shucks, will get them tomorrow and they’re not tremendously pleased when they go home. Business is different. You’re trying to affect people’s lives every single day. So we take it very seriously here and we try to have fun while we’re doing it to make sure we’re we’re creative and innovative. But it’s very different than kind of the the swings of being in it and being not in it when when you’re doing sports.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:56] Now, getting back to the business part of things, when did you start realizing that with this idea that you had something that is viable? Like did you have a moment where you’re like, okay, this I’m getting kind of some love from these beta testers or I got my first client and they, they see some things that here that can really scale. Like, when did you start seeing those breadcrumbs that you had something?

Steve Gilman: [00:11:26] Yeah, excellent question. So Hooten and I got together and had to figure out what we were really passionate about. And when it came to professional development, I mentioned we had some disconnects with employers or as employers with our employees. And so there’s really two things that came together very quickly in our process. The first is we built a site that aggregated different tools, kind of as like a very late MVP. We said, hey, online courses, books, come get whatever you want. And within the first day, people came to the site and then they mentioned that they need some way for their companies to sponsor. So if you’re going to take a $400 course on Coursera, that’s awesome. But my company needs to pay for it, right? So we quickly realized, hey, this is all going to land within a company ROI for attracting and retaining folks. And then too we started talking to a company leaders and there was always, always, always a disconnect between what executives or managers thought they were doing for people in terms of professional development and what the employees thought that companies were doing for them. All right. So a typical conversation would be we invest in all of our employees. They get whatever resources they want. They continuously upskill and it’s part of their performance. Talk to an employee that maybe just came into the company or has a new manager and they say, Yeah, I know there’s some budget that I can access for external resources, but I’m not familiar with how to use it. I wouldn’t know where to find it, and I’m a little afraid to put it on my personal card because I’ve heard some disaster stories about reimbursements in the past. I mean, that was a typical conversation that kept happening over and over and over again. So the reason we love our business models, because we align the employees interests and goals with the employer’s interests and goals, and we do it all from a single platform, something that technology helps a tremendous amount with and that, you know, honestly, we could have started years earlier to make sure it happens.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:28] So with the professional development, the way you’ve defined it, it sounds like it includes online courses and things like that. Does it also include like coaching, business coaching, those kind of elements as well?

Steve Gilman: [00:13:43] Yeah. So we defined professional development as individualized. There has to be specific budgets because everyone’s goals are usually different. We define it as strategic upskilling. So it’s not just to be competent with your current job or be compliant with what you’re currently doing, but how to get ahead, how to challenge the status quo in your own career. And it’s usually from external resources. And that doesn’t come from us. That comes from employees. And surveys show that 99% of employees participate in professional development and activities. And of that, 90% of them are external. So it’s outside of what the company is actually able to provide. When it comes to format. We are edtech at the end of the day. So online courses continue to be great and there’s huge demand for them. In-person courses and seminars, things like that are coming back. We’re starting to see conferences. Webinars coaching you mentioned, is pretty huge, connecting with people that have experience, books, podcasts and everything also. We’re format agnostic because we know most employees are format agnostic. Typically, we’ll see people get one or two courses, a book from Amazon, a podcast, and maybe a coach for three months out of the year. And that’s how they choose to develop their skills.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:01] So what’s next? What do you need next? How can we help?

Steve Gilman: [00:15:07] Yeah, I appreciate that. We’re we’re getting the word out. We have launched our latest features which completely streamline everything for the company and for the employee. If for those not familiar with range, we’re a marketplace solution where employees can add whatever they need to the marketplace, be it a coach, conference book, podcast, anything like that, while also discovering their own. And now we help companies streamline payments, which helps with security, and people don’t have to do any personal reimbursement. So when we go into companies, we are an end to end solution that requires little to no management and or oversight, but the companies win and the employees continuous continuously win. We have enough data at this point to provide great recommendations for someone, and at any step of their career and for anybody in the organization, no matter what your job function is, which is different than what we’ve seen in the market, we’re getting out there and we’re building professional development programs with companies either from scratch, we’re taking over software solutions like a single online course provider, or we’re working to help manage the stipends that pre exist, just making it more transparent to employees and delivering an ROI to the company. So no matter what stage a company is at, we can come in and help very seamlessly with with some great technology.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:32] Now, how did you hear about Startup Showdown and Panoramic Ventures? How did they get on your radar?

Steve Gilman: [00:16:38] Yeah, so we were kind of in the middle of a fund raise a few months ago, so I was well aware of panoramic ventures and and what they have done in the space. And we’re also part of Capital Factory, so we’re Capital Factory Portfolio Company, which is an accelerator investment fund co-working center out of Austin, Texas. Startup Showdown worked with Capital Factory in partnership not only for investment purposes, but also to host the startup showdown. So we got connected through Capital Factory. We love going through the application process because it helped us reorient and organize our thoughts and we kind of launched off into actually getting to the finals and making a trip to Austin to to have fun with them. On the Startup Showdown.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:31] Now, can you talk a little bit about when when you get kind of go through the ringer there and they really are asking hard questions how how you handle that? And in terms because it takes confidence, but humility, you have to be confident in your product and service, but you also have to be coachable and and listened. How did your you and the team handle that?

Steve Gilman: [00:17:56] Yeah. So I think the first thing is you have to have a business that’s headed in the right direction. Right. So no application can be strong unless you know the market, you know your position in the market and you’re you’re gaining traction. You’re helping people in that way. The first step is always a written application, pitch decks, things like that. So until you’re able to really get to know someone and they’re able to understand your background, your product and service is exactly what you put out there. So descriptions of backgrounds, pitch decks, things like that. I think one of the pieces that we excelled in, but was also very advantageous for us, was what they call a mentoring session, where they organize the entrepreneurs. They for 2 hours put you in front of four different mentors. One individual is from Panoramic Ventures as an investor. The other three were from different areas of business. All three of those, in addition to the panoramic ventures investor I connected with pretty immediately I’ve stayed in contact with and their whole thing was pitched to me and I’ll give you my thoughts, feedback and everything else while making sure that you are a good fit to be evaluated for the next round. So that was really just getting in front of people and almost like a speed dating, but really meant to be beneficial to the company. And I really thought that was a good part of the process that I haven’t seen traditionally in a lot of the competitions.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:24] Now in your career, I would imagine you’ve had mentors or people that you’ve looked up to and maybe used as a kind of a guide to go through the process. Is there anybody from the startup world that you’re kind of lean on for advice or whether you know them personally or you just read their blog or their books? Is there anybody out there as your new kind of your role model of startup founder?

Steve Gilman: [00:19:48] Oh, yeah. Listen, there’s there’s way too much there’s way too many to mention my network from undergrad and graduate school. I continually to continually lean on almost every single day. I’ve become friends with investors of mine. I’ve made investors friends of mine. And so I think in terms of people that I looked up to, I can throw out a few names. Going into business school, I wrote an essay on wanting to be a consultant, which I think is what most people do if they don’t know what they want to do coming out of business school. I was turning down job offers to make sure I could be an entrepreneur. I think one of the people that I credit for that is an individual named Dave Lerner. He’s director of entrepreneurship at Columbia University as a whole. But I knew him through Columbia Business School and he taught me that 0 to 1 kind of mentality of how to go out and do it. Another person that I kind of look up to is Ryan Petersen of Flex. He’s a multi time entrepreneur who came back actually to a class to teach about how he built his businesses. And so I have fun following his career and listening to his interviews and things like that. We were able to spend some time together and I got more advice in 5 minutes in a car ride than I did from him about fund raising. Then I traditionally see reading articles and articles and following different people. So those are two folks that came from my business school career I continually lean on and look up to as entrepreneurs.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:29] Now, before we wrap, I’d like you to share a piece of advice for other founders and maybe let’s talk specifically of folks who have gone and played sports at a high level, because I think that that’s a unique group. And I think that a lot of times those folks are high achievers, no matter what they do well outside the sports world. Can you share some advice for somebody that plays sports at a high level? And then, you know, the clock ran out for them that they’ve gone as far as they can go. And it’s time now to enter the business world. Can you share some advice for them to either start their own thing or just to be successful?

Steve Gilman: [00:22:11] Yeah, that the the transition between sports and business, especially entrepreneurship, is a difficult one. What’s made it easier and what I think I would give advice to for any founder is that when you’re on a sports team, you have a team, you have a coach. Depending on what level you’re at, they all get better. You never want to be the best person on your team, right? Because then you’re learning less than than most people on your team. And so when it comes down to being a founder, transitioning to a business career, you kind of have to set up those relationships on your own. Specifically talking about building your own team, which is different than you’ve experienced in sports. I’m talking about getting with other founders or other business like minded people that do something similar because you’re going to learn from those people the most. And then in terms of coaches and where you’re going to go, you need to gain experience. So build relationships with mentors. You’d be lucky to call them investors, obviously, and have financial stakes in each other’s outcomes. But when it comes down to it, if you don’t seek all of the components that you used to have playing on a sports team at a competitive level, you’re not going to learn as quick. You’re not going to be as effective. And to be honest, playing at a competitive level, you love having teammates, right? So never isolate yourself. Never spend all your day reading on the Internet, trying to learn something new. Get around the people that already know what they’re doing and hopefully get accepted into into networks that can help you continue to build and grow.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:46] Yeah, that’s super important advice. And like you said, in one five minute car ride, you learn more than you did reading, you know, pages and pages of books and articles so the right person can accelerate your learning and your network everything dramatically. So meet more people.

Steve Gilman: [00:24:07] Yeah, that’s right. I in undergrad, I concentrated on mechanical engineering design. All right, so how do you build a bicycle from someone from scratch? What materials do you use? How do they connect? What’s the packaging look like? Stuff like that. And I had an influential professor. That one day senior year looked at the class and he goes, Och, I have no idea what size, sprocket or gear to put on this bicycle. How do I figure it out? And 15 people in the class, 14 of them went directly to the mechanical engineering book for design. We had in front of us, flip through, started writing down calculations and while it looked like I was the slowest one to start opening my book and looking for calculations, I ended up having the best answer, which was the point of his question, which is, if you don’t know, just ask somebody. Yeah, there’s calculations you can do, there’s chalkboards you can draw on, there’s different tools and software you can build out. But if someone’s already built the bicycle and they know what size the sprocket should be for a certain gear length, ask them. And that’s where you learn the most. So building on human experiences has been kind of the theme throughout my career.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:18] Good stuff, Steve. Congratulations on all the success. If somebody wants to learn more about range, what’s a website?

Steve Gilman: [00:25:25] Yeah, you can find us at get range dot com, get range dot com. And we’re happy to chat with folks about professional development on LinkedIn personally or through the company page.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:36] All right. Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Steve Gilman: [00:25:40] Thank you so much, Lee.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:42] Appreciate it. All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Startup Showdown.

Intro: [00:25:48] As always, thanks for joining us. And don’t forget to follow and subscribe to the Startup Showdown podcast. So you get the latest episode as it drops wherever you listen to podcasts to learn more and apply to our next startup Showdown Pitch Competition Visit Showdown VC. That’s Showdown Dot VC. All right, that’s all for this week. Goodbye for now.